I used Audacity once to edit an mp3 of a voice file (from a radio show I host) and was really disappointed in the resulting audio quality. When I asked about this in the Audacity online forum, I was told the reason was that Audacity takes the original mp3, decompresses it and converts it to the Audacity format for editing. Then when you're done, you recompress it to mp3 again. People said the repeated compression/decompression/compression resulted in degradation of the sound file. Is this true, and it wouldn't it affect music files as well?

i very rarely use Audacity for .mp3 files anymore, just for .wav files; and i'm certainly no audio expert, but the way i understand it, .mp3 files are the result of audio compression, and are not actually compressed files, in the way that a .zip file (or an .shn/.flac file) is compressed for instance, and so when Audacity opens an .mp3 file it is not "decompressing" anything -- the file you open is exactly what you have on your desktop or wherever you have the file saved; then, after you do what you have to do to the .mp3 file, you save it as .mp3, and it does exactly that; what you need to be attentive to is when you save it as .mp3, you should modify the bit rate of the file to be saved to match the bit rate of your original file, therefore avoiding any difference in audio quality or added artifacts; a few years ago when i did mess around with .mp3 using Audacity, and keeping the bit rate matched, the result was always of equal sound to what i originally had

I guess you can do it the hard way too. My NERO 6 software will cut up most any music file using the WAVE EDITOR. It's easy to remove thoae 2 second gaps between tracks. A burned CD-R can be ripped into a desktop folder in MP3, WMA or even the I-POD MP4 (AAC) format.

Third party Nero 6 plugins (www.afterdawn.com) will convert music files to a dozen different formats. It isn't FREE but you can get discontinued NERO 6 software on EBAY really cheap these days. It will do just about anything we might do using Widows 98SE-XP. You'll have to buy the new version 8 if you hasve a VISTA operating system. The lack of backwards compatibility is one big reason why VISTA is not selling like hotcakes...

in the early days, i tried really hard to like Vista, but since then reality has set in, and i fear it is the worst Windows platform i have ever used; in fact, i can't stand it; i of course am speaking of the user-interface and not what goes on behind the scenes, which from what i understand, is actually an upgrade over what came previous

Each time you pull up an mp3 into Audacity and then re-save it as an mp3, you're performing an additional compression, and there's a further degradation of the sound quality. It doesn't matter if the bitrate is the same as before. It's an additional round of compression.

But that's not to say the result will sound bad. It depends on the bitrate you're using, and the kind of music, and your ears, and other factors. I've found that I can go several rounds of compression without hearing any noteworthy deterioration in the sound quality at a 192Kbps variable bit rate.

But in situations where you really need to avoid any additional degradation of an mp3, you need to use a program like mp3DirectCut -- which cuts mp3's without decompressing and recompressing.